Winter's Tenacious Hold
by Grim Lupine
Summary: In England, winter is heralded by the burgeoning chill in Edmund’s bones, a frozen reminder of the past he cannot escape. //oneshot// //one-sided EdmundPeter//


Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me.

**Warning**: Contains thoughts of incest, if you hadn't figured that out by the pairing.

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In England, winter is heralded by the burgeoning chill in Edmund's bones, a frozen reminder of the past he cannot escape. He wraps himself in his sheets and watches the frost on his windows, remembers the icy walls of a castle and its dungeon, even those warmer than the heart of their mistress.

It is told—and, in Narnia, always will be—that King Edmund the Just was but a boy when he entered Narnia, misguided, and fell upon the wrong path when he stumbled that way. It is told that he helped the Witch in her evil ways but soon saw her for what she really was, and the traitor was reborn into a King. A King that ruled with wisdom far beyond his years, who reigned in the Golden Age of Narnia.

Narnia does not forget his transgressions, but they have forgiven them with a benevolent hand in the history books. Edmund sometimes forgets, when it's spring and the air tastes like growth and it feels like the happy days again, but it is much harder for him to forgive himself. He hasn't managed it yet, isn't sure he ever will.

Peter looks at him, sometimes, with eyes shadowed not with mistrust, but with grief for what Edmund has gone through. What Edmund is still putting himself through. He tells him, _You've more than made up for something you did when you were _ten_, Ed_. He says, _I wish you would stop holding yourself responsible._

_But I can't_, Edmund wants to say. _Because I was a child but I wasn't misguided—I knew what I was doing. I wanted to my very marrow to see myself Prince and you at my feet; because then maybe it would be like it once was, when I was your favorite because I was your only brother, and the two of us were like twins. Like two halves of the same heart. _

If winter runs through Edmund's body, then Peter is spring. Peter is the wakening of life, his sun, harbinger of light. Edmund dreams of snow settling into his open mouth and choking him from the inside out; he dreams of Peter's hands warm upon his cheeks, cupping his chin (stroking down his bare arms and legs, heating his flesh with love and devotion and _desire_, but _no_, he is _not thinking _of that, he will _not_ admit another darkness into his soul). Peter, in Edmund's dreams, cracks the ice that surrounds (_protects_) Edmund's heart.

This is something else that Peter does not know about Edmund, another creeping decay in the very center of him that Peter could never comprehend. And how could Edmund tell him?

_I fear_, he imagines himself saying, _that you have done me in, my brother. You are and have been everything golden in my life, every fire that chases away the baying demons at my heels. When I sleep free of the Witch's poison it is only because your love is a shield in my mind. In you I have found the one person who can calm my fears and take me away from despair, who knows me throughout like a well-worn companion of a book, who gives me reason to disbelieve the Witch's insidious words from that cold past: that there is only hatred and ugliness in the world around us. I know that there is not and never will be anyone who surpasses you in my mind, and it is because of all this, and because you are my brother, that I fear you have done me in._

He tastes these words on his tongue, bitter with truth and hopelessness, and knows they will never pass his lips. Diplomacy is sometimes a better-tasting word for lying, and if he learned anything in Narnia it is how to keep his secrets behind a smiling face.

Peter, though faulted, fallible, and human, is still the best of anything Edmund has seen, and Edmund would not have the gold of his soul tarnished by his own darkness for anything in the world.

So when Peter comes to him to speak of Narnia, recalling with a fond smile those glory days when everything felt right, Edmund listens and ducks his head so that Peter cannot see his darkened eyes. Edmund says, _In you it seems that Narnia is still with us, Peter, brother mine, _and when he falls asleep that night even the burning remnants of the kiss Peter had brushed across his forehead are not enough to hold back the icy arms of winter, twining around his soul and calling him down to the black night.

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